3 min read 🤓

Orlando & Artaud wed bound at La Générale Nord-Est, even

march 09, 2024

The above photograph bears witness to the devious minimalism and intricate simplicity of Le Mariage d'Orlando et Artaud, même, an audio installation proposed by Joseph Nechvatal during a one week residency—March 1st to March 8th—in La Générale Nord-Est's black box (aka the auditorium).

Visitors invited to come and experience Joseph's work, in the early evening of Friday March 8th, could sit down on the chairs two at a time, as couples to be wed, each facing a black curtain, each exposed to the same sounds projected towards them by another couple, a pair of loudspeakers, posed on either side of La G's auditorium as stern dark waiters: one at a distance of approximately two to three meters to their left, and its twin counterpart mirroring this placement on their right sides. One of the speakers played back, in an endless loop, the cOmplete OrlandO et la tempête viral symphOny redux suite (a sonic deconstruction of an annonymous reading of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando", the sequence of tracks on the first of Nechvatal's double album set The Viral Tempest), and from the other sounded the complete pour finir avec le jugement de dieu viral symphOny plague (a take on "Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu", Antonin Artaud's classic radio play from november 1947, which is the sequence of tracks on the second of these albums).

Note though that for a couple of listeners thus seated back-to-back, hearing is as if listening from opposite sides of a mirror. While one listener's left ear is attuned to the sounds of the viral Orlando, it will be their partner's right ear that opens up to Orlando. Conversely, if one's right ear is engaged with the viral Artaud, it will be the other's left ear doing so, thus fostering a shared yet distinct auditory engagement for both.

The result was impressive, in the utter simplicity of set-up, as well as in the resulting sounding and conceptual complexity.

Technically, realising this (double, mirrored) speculative deconstructive multiple sonic cut-up & overlay is easy indeed, and pretty much anyone will be able to re-live the experience proposed by Joseph in La Générale's auditorium, at home or at any other chosen place.

So, yes, perform this marriage all by yourself, wed bind Orlando & Artaud, diy!

The double vinyl can be ordered and the audio files downloaded, or just simply streamed, on the album's Bandcamp page. By opening that page in two tabs of your browser, you will be able to listen to the Orlando piece and the Artaud piece simultaneously, as an overlay, as a mash. Better still, if you have the gear, you can separate the sources, like Joseph did at La Générale: use two computing things with webbrowsers and connected to the internet, each with its own (bluetooth) speaker(set), and place these at opposite sides of your living room, your studio, your dorm.

Somewhere in between the speakers, put two chairs, or stools.

Invite your partner, lover, mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, neighbour, colleague, to come sit there with you, back to back. Dim the lights, and play the Viral Tempest's Artaud tracks on the one side, and its Orlando tracks on the other.

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Then halt thinking. Just listen.

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tags: Joseph Nechvatal, La Générale

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